Case Study: Commercial Insight vs. Product-Centric Content
As of January 2017, a wastewater treatment solutions provider had 100 pieces of content on Water Online. After classifying by content type, 93 were product-centric assets and 7 were considered commercial insight.
Product-Centric Assets (PCAs) focus on the vendor’s solution and provide detailed product information and value differentiation to persuade the reader to purchase the vendor’s product. They are inherently promotional in nature, designed to hook the reader and best suited for the end of the purchasing process.
Commercial Insight (CI) aims to educate the reader, helping them to understand their business better by providing insight about trends, processes, regulations and different approaches that the reader finds commercially valuable. CI is less about the vendor and devoted entirely to satisfying the reader’s informational needs. In so doing, CI is far more valuable to the reader in the early stages of a project and creates the critical connection that provides a preference for your PCAs later in the buyer’s journey when selecting product.
When evaluating the performance of the provider’s content on Water Online over the past 6 months, B2BrandWater.com found the following:
- Total Engagements: 3,316
- Total Engagements from Commercial Insight: 1,612
- Total Engagements from Product-Centric Assets: 1,704
On the face of it, the wastewater treatment solutions provider’s results suggest a nice healthy balance (almost 50/50 split) between its product-centric content and its commercial insight. However, let’s remember that the Company only had seven CI documents compared to 93 PCAs. If we look at average engagements per document, the results are startling:
- Average Number of Engagements per PCA: 18.3
- Average Number of Engagements per CI: 230.3
In this comparison, the Company’s Commercial Insight is 16x more engaging. Or put another way, is sixteen times more likely to engage a wastewater treatment professional than the Company’s product-centric literature.
The findings also indicate that each content asset providing commercial insight drives 243 engagements in product-centric content for the provider. We understand that for each product launch or new enhancement, product literature and supporting media is needed and is created. But it’s fascinating to see how much engagement on your product literature can be driven by a far smaller and yet far more significant investment in non-product related content.
Image credit: "Data Analytics Decision Making," deepak pal © 2018, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/